TIME Talks about Linux

Design by Contract

Dr. Bertrand Meyer, designer of the Eiffel programming language, was in
Seattle to give his one day seminar on "Design by Contract". The purpose of
this workstation is teach software engineers this unique object-oriented
development method which emphasizes building reliable sytems through
well-defined specifications and communication between the different parties
to the system.

Talking to Dr. Meyer by phone, I asked him how Eiffel was better than Java.
He gave me three reasons:

Eiffel supports multiple inheritance.

Eiffel more easily builds container structures such as lists, queues,
stacks and trees.

Eiffel has built in support for "design by contract" development.

When I asked him about Open Source and Linux, he replied, "Eiffel's primary library
was released as open source on August 4, and other libraries will be
released in the future. While Eiffel is a commercial product, we see the
advantages of Open Source. We were one of the first supporters of Linux,
and the Linux community is very important to us."

This alleviates the need for the chroot environment that previous
development work was being conducted in, and allows work to progress even
faster than before. This will also allow more people to join in the
development effort easily.

Ottawa, Canada, October, 27, 1998 Corel Computer and Red Hat Software,
Inc. today announced an agreement to bring the Red Hat distribution of
Linux to the Corel Computer NetWinder family of thin-clients and thin-servers.
Under the three-year agreement, Red Hat will port Red Hat Linux 5.1
and future releases of the software to the StrongARM processor, the
underlying architecture of the NetWinder.

SPI Web Pages Active

Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 10:33:43 -0500
Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is pleased to announce its new web
pages. They can be found at
http://www.spi-inc.org/. SPI is a non profit
organization that was founded to help projects in developing software for
the community. Several projects are currently being supported through
monetary and hardware donations that have been made to SPI. As SPI is a
non profit organization, all donations to it and the projects it supports
are tax deductible.

Oppression?

A student at UCLA, and several of the Linux users there in the dorms claim
they are experiencing severe discrimination. The whole story is at
http://www.nerdherd.net/oppression/.
Take a look!

Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 Hamm

The Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 'Hamm' distribution was recently recognized by
Australian Personal Computer Magazine http://www.apcmag.com/. It received
the 'Highly Commended Award' for being 'a very high-quality distribution,
with an extensive selection of carefully prepared software packages.

Check Out This New Mailing List

About this mailing list:
The purpose of this mailing list is to an open forum to discuss anything
related to starting, growing and maintaining Linux User Groups. Whether you
are trying to get a new LUG started and need some practical advice, or have
built one already and are willing to help other groups, this is the mailing
list for you, whether you have 5 members or 500!

How to subscribe to this list:
Send a message to majordomo@ntlug.org with the following text in the
message body:
subscribe lug_support YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS

Free Software Award Event Kicks off "One World, One Net" Conference

Larry Wall received the First Annual Free Software Foundation Award
for the Advancement of Free Software at the MIT Media Lab on Friday evening.
At a reception and presentation attended by CPSR Conference registrants,
computer hackers and members of the press, FSF Founder Richard Stallman
presented the award, a quilted GNU (GNU's Not Unix) wall hanging.

Larry Wall won the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement
of Free Software for his programming, most notably Perl, a robust scripting
language for sophisticated text manipulation and system management.
His other widely-used programs include rn (news reader), patch
(development and distribution tool), metaconfig (a program that writes
Configure scripts), and the Warp space-war game.

Eureka!

On Tuesday, September 15th, 1998 in Paris, France at our user event named
"Eureka", and again on October 5th at DECUS in Los Angeles, Compaq Computer
Corporation announced intent to extend their support to the Linux operating
system to include Intel as well as the Alpha platforms. In addition to
extending this support to another architecture, Compaq is in the process of
putting together a comprehensive program of Linux support.

This support includes, but is not limited to:

working with the Linux community to port Linux to new
platforms

qualification of Linux on both Intel and Alpha platforms

providing selected platforms with no license, specifically for Linux
and other freely available operating systems

working with the Linux community and distributions to provide
world-wide telephone and hardware support

In continuing the concept of working with the Linux community, Compaq intends
to extend its Linux support through its extensive channels partner programs.
Compaq feels that this will give the broadest possible selection of products
and solutions to our end customers, with our VARs, OEMs, Distributors and
Resellers working with the customer to match the distribution, the layered
products and third party offerings to that customer's needs.

IBM Enhances its Websphere Application Server

IBM announced that it has extended the HTTP services in IBM WebSphere*
Application Servers in the areas of performance, security and platform
support by adding new functionality to the HTTP services that are packaged
with WebSphere and are based on the Apache HTTP Server.

Today's announcements include technology developed by IBM Research
that boosts the performance of HTTP services in the IBM WebSphere
Application Server and Secure Socket Layer
(SSL) support that provides customers with the security necessary to
operate a web site that can handle sensitive information, such as financial
transactions. In addition, IBM announced a port of the Apache HTTP Server
to the AS/400* operating system. The AS/400 port will be offered to the
Apache Group through the Open Source model.
The Fast Response Cache Accelerator (FRCA) technology, developed by
IBM Research, doubles the performance of HTTP services in WebSphere on
Windows NT, according to lab tests done by SPEC (The Standard Performance
Evaluation Corporation).

Both the FRCA and SSL technologies from IBM will be available at no
additional charge as part of all editions of the IBM WebSphere Application
Servers. The technologies will be released in the next version of
WebSphere Application Server before the end of the year. The FRCA
technology will also be used to boost the performance of the HTTP Server
for OS/390*, and will be available as part of OS/390 Version 2 Release 7 in
March of 1999.

CommProc

A new OpenSource project, a general distributed-computing
toolkit for quick assembly of distributed applications
called CommProc, was presented at the October ApacheCon98
conference. CommProc is an advocacy effort for Linux and
Apache and includes an interface module for the Apache
HTTP server. Documentation and source code for the project
is available at: http://www.commproc.com

Launch of LinuxWorld Magazine

IDGs Web Publishing Inc. announced the launch of LinuxWorld magazine
(http://www.linuxworld.com). A
Web-only magazine supplying technical information to professional
Linux users who are implementing Linux and related open source technologies
in their computing environments.

Inside the first issue are stories such as an interview with Linus
Torvalds, the first installment of the Linux 101 column titled "A
distribution by any other name," and a look at the new Windows NT
domain security features found in Samba 2.0 titled "Doing the NIS/NT
Samba."

The goal of the technical track of Linux Expo is to bring
together engineers and researchers doing innovative work
associated with Linux.

See you at LinuxExpo '99!

USENIX 1999 Events

USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. Its international
membership includes engineers, system administrators, scientists, and
technicians working on the cutting edge. Their conferences are recognized
for delivering pragmatically-oriented, technically excellent reports in a
highly interactive, vendor-neutral forum.

SmartWare DevCon99

Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 20:28:52 -0600
DevCon99 is scheduled for November 14 and 15, 1998. 49 hours of training
shoehorned into two days including "How to Use the Graphic Database
Frontend", Developing a RAD application, the introduction of the
SmartERP program, marketing, advertising and free videotapes for all
attendees. SmartWare2000, offers solutions for the small to medium company
and is the only product capable of running on everything from old 286 ATs
up to Sun or SiliconGraphics systems and use the same data at the same time.

Software Announcements

Cygnus(R) Solutions announced the availability of GNUPro(TM) Toolkit, a new
product line of fully tested, low-cost development tools releases for native
and embedded software developers. Addressing the needs of the growing Linux
community, the first release of Cygnus GNUPro Toolkit is targeted at
software engineers developing commercial applications on the Linux
operating system (OS). Today's announcement marks the first in a
series of GNUPro Toolkit releases planned for a range of platforms.
"Cygnus has extended its commitment to the Linux community and users of
Red Hat Linux by providing a fully-certified official release of GNU
development tools," said Bob Young, president and CEO of Red Hat
Software. "Given the increasing popularity of both Red Hat Linux and
Cygnus GNUPro, Red Hat is pleased to continue its partnership with
Cygnus to provide software developers the highest quality Linux
operating system and development tools."

Highly Tested Tool - Includes 47,000 unit tests (30,000 for the
standard compiler test suite, 10,000 for the native debugger test suite,
and 7,000 for C++ features); regression testing (both reported bugs and
those uncovered by Cygnus); conformance testing (tests from Perennial
and Plum Hall); and tests for building popular applications.

Pricing and Availability

Cygnus GNUPro Toolkit for Linux is priced at $149 and is immediately
available for Red Hat Linux 4.2 and 5.1 on x86 platforms by ordering
online at http://www.cygnus.com/gnupro/.

Panorama

Panorama is part of the GNU project. For more information about it,
visit the URL 'http://www.gnu.org'. It is released under the GPL
license, that you can read in the file 'LICENSE' in this directory.

Panorama is a framework for 3D graphics production. This will include
modeling, rendering, animating, post-processing, etc. Currently, there
is no support for animation, but this will be added soon.

Functionally, it is structured as an API, composed by two dynamic
libraries, and several plugins, that you can optionally load in runtime.
A simple console mode front-end for this API is included in the package,
that can load a scene description in one of the supported scene
languages, and then outputs a single image file in any of the supported
graphic formats.

Panorama can be easily extended with plugins. Plugins are simply
dynamically linked C++ classes. You can add plugins without
recompilation, and even in runtime, when this option is added to the
graphic interface.

Netscape Wrapper v2.0.0

What is it:
The Netscape Wrapper is a bourne shell script used to invoke Netscape
on a Unix platform. It performs copying initial default files, a postscript
bug work around, security check, and setting up the environment. The new version
also provides enhanced functionality.

What is new in this version:

Rewritten. Faster and cleaner execution.

Fully sh. No longer relies on bash features.

Root security check bypass.

New options subset. (+news, +mail, ...)

Defaults to opening a new window.

The most significant change is that the script will attempt to
open a new browser before executing Netscape. IE if no Netscape process
is present, Netscape will be executed, otherwise a new browser window is
created. Likewise when using the new option subset, if Netscape is not
running, it will be execute with that option as the default window, or if
Netscape is running, that option will be opened using the current process.

plotutils

Version 2.1.6 of the GNU plotting utilities (plotutils) package is now
available. This release includes a significantly enhanced version of the
free C/C++ GNU libplot library for vector graphics, as well as seven
command-line utilities oriented toward data plotting (graph, plot,
tek2plot, plotfont, spline, ode, and double). A 130-page manual in texinfo
format is included.

As of this release, GNU libplot can produce graphics files in Adobe
Illustrator format. So you may now write C or C++ programs to draw vector
graphics that Illustrator can edit. Also, the support for the free `idraw'
and `xfig' drawing editors has been enhanced. For example, the file format
used by xfig 3.2 is now supported.

PROCMETER V3.0

This is a new version of ProcMeter that has been re-written almost completely
since the previous version.

It is now designed to be more user-friendly and customisable, the textual as
well as graphical outputs and the extra mouse options avilable are part of this.
It is perhaps now less of a system status monitor and more of a user information
display. It can be configured to show the date and/or time instead of having a
clock and it can also monitor your e-mail inbox and act like biff.

MAM/VRS

MAM/VRS is a library for animated, interactive 3D graphics, written in
C++. It works on Unix (tested on Linux, Solaris and Irix) and Windows
95/98/NT. MAM/VRS can produce output for many rendering systems: OpenGL
(or Mesa), POVRay, RenderMan and VRML are supported yet. It provides
bindings to many GUIs: Xt (Motif/Lesstif/Athena), Qt, Tcl/Tk, MFC and
soon GTk. It is covered by the terms of the GNU LGPL. Visit our homepage
for more information and to download it:
http://wwwmath.uni-muenster.de/~mam

KIM - interactive process manager 1.1-1

Description:
The Kim is interactive (ncurses) user friendly process manager
for OS Linux. It reads the /proc(5) directory. The '/proc' is
a pseudo-filesystem which is used as an interface to kernel
data structures.

Version & Dependency:
The Kim is independent on other program, but all version depend
on libproc >= 1.2.6 and ncurses.

Lincense:
Copyright (c) 1998 Zak Karel "Zakkr"

PIKT

PIKT is a set of programs, scripts, data and configuration files for
administering networked workstations. PIKT's primary purpose is to
monitor systems, report problems (usually by way of e-mail "alerts"),
and fix those problems when possible. PIKT is not an end-user tool; it
is (for now) to be used by systems administrators only.

PIKT includes an embedded scripting language, approaching in sophistication
several of the other scripting languages, and introducing some new features
perhaps never seen before.

PIKT also employs a sophisticated, centrally managed, per-machine/OS
version control mechanism. You can, setting aside the PIKT language,
even use it to version control your Perl, AWK, and shell scripts. Or,
use it as a replacement for cron.

Yard 4.04.03

YARD-SQL version 4.04.03 has been released. Until now, it is available
for Linux and SCO-UNIX and contains the following new features:

YARD-ESQLC now contains libsql and sqlnets as shared libraries.
The product YARD-ESQLC now contains libsql.a and sqlnets.a as shared
objects too. The names are libsql.so and sqlnets.so

The base address of dynamic SHM is choosen based on existing segments.
Until know the base address of dynamic SHM segments was determined by the
kernel (Parameter 0 in shmat()). Know this address is calculated from the
existing SHM segments, so that the complete SHM will have no gaps.
This behaviour can be switched off by setting the environment variable
YARD_NOCONSECSHM.

The socket flag TCP_NODELAY is set for socket connections.
On some OS (eg. FreeBSD), setting TCP_NODELAY on the socket connection
between client and server dramatically improves performance. There should
be no negative effect by setting this flag. So it will now always be set.
It can be disabled by setting the environment variable YARD_NOTCPNODELAY
to 1.

The disk configuration of a DBS is stored in the DBS in addition to the
cfgfile

yardinit offers a new option -l for reducing logfiles.
If option -l is used when a DBS is switched from offline mode to main-
tenance mode, all logical logs are released instead of performing
a logical recovery. Though this jeopardizes logical consistency it is an
easy way for starting a DBS when all logical logs are filled up.
The correct way for starting such a DBS is to start yardinit -m on one
terminal and then start yardarch -l on another terminal for backing up
the logical logs while yardinit is waiting.

Clients can use strings for inserting data into BLOBs
Until now, a BLOB structure (eg. in ESQLC) or an object type (in Java) had
to be used for inserting data into a BLOB/TEXT column. Now, Clients can
use simple strings for that purpose. When the server runs in batch mode, a
string will still be used as file name.

RealSecure 3.0

ISS today announced RealSecure 3.0, a new, integrated system that
combines intrusion detection with state-of-the-art response and
management capabilities to form the industry's first threat management
solution. Formerly known as "Project Lookout", RealSecure 3.0 is the
integrates network- and system-based intrusion detection
and response capabilities into a single enterprise threat management
framework providing around-the-clock, end-to-end information protection.

Applix Released Applixware 4.4.1 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows
Platforms

Applix, Inc. the release of Applixware 4.4.1 for the Linux platform as
well as all major UNIX operating systems, Windows NT and Windows 95.
This latest release delivers a new filtering framework that has been
optimized for document interchange between Microsoft's Office 97 product,
as well as Y2K compliance.

Applixware includes Applix Words, Spreadsheets, Graphics, Presents, and HTML
Author. This Linux version also includes Applix Data and Applix Builder as
standard modules. Applixware for Linux is available directly from Applix, as
well as from its partners, including Red Hat and S.U.S.E.

Linux version beta test users also attest to the results. "Export of Applix
Words documents to Word 97 works great, even with Swedish letters," said Klaus
Neumann, a university cognitive scientist. He continued, "I think Applixware
is the most promising office solution for Linux. I've tried StarOffice,
WordPerfect, Lyx. Nothing comes even close to Applixware--there are none of
the memory, uptime, printing, or spell-checking problems I experience with the
other suites."

Applixware 4.4.1 for Linux includes for the first time Applix Data, a new
module offering point and click access to information stored in relational
databases. No SQL knowledge is required to access the information. Once
accessed, the data can be linked directly into Applix Words, Spreadsheets,
Graphics, Presents, and HTML Author.

Crack dot Com is closing its doors

WHY: Ran out of cash.

REALLY WHY: Lot of reasons, but then again, there are a lot of reasons
that we got as far as we did. I think the killer reason, though,
was that Golgotha was compared by publishers primarily to Battlezone
and Uprising, and those titles sold really poorly.

WHAT NOW?: Now we file articles of dissolution w/ the secretary of
state, and we file bankruptcy.

IS THAT IT?!: No.

WHAT ELSE?: We're releasing the Golgotha source code, and data to the
public domain.

WHERE'S THE SOURCE CODE?: I want to personally thank everyone who
supported & rooted for us. That was really nice of you.

BLAH BLAH, WHERE'S THE SOURCE?: I want to apologize
to the fans and business partners we've let down.

BOO HOO! WE CARE. OUT WITH IT!: Thanks for your patience. The source
& data can be found at http://www.crack.com/golgotha_release. And of course, the ex-Crack developers are up to new & interesting
things which you can follow at the web site.